Western Digital 20TB NAS HDD debuts: Comes with 64GB flash for $499.99

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Western Digital NAS HDD is a product specially designed for NAS systems, and relevant optimizations have been made for this purpose. Recently, Western Digital put its latest 20TB NAS HDD product on the page, which is a red disk with a capacity of 20TB.

This is not the first 20TB hard drive sold by Western Digital. There are already 20TB WD Gold and Ultrastar DC HC560 series products sold, while these are geared toward enterprise and data center use, the WD Red Pro line is closer to mainstream consumers. Western Digital’s page shows that WD Red Pro 20TB is a standard 3.5-inch HDD, provides a SATA 6Gbps interface, rotates at 7200RPM, and is equipped with a 512MB cache.

It adopts energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) technology, with a single disc capacity of 2.2TB, a total of 9 discs, and a three-level drive to improve the positioning accuracy of the magnetic head on the track. In addition, this hard drive also supports Western Digital’s exclusive NASware 3.0 advanced firmware technology and 3D Active Balance Plus, an enhanced dual-plane balance control technology.

However, some information is not reflected on the Western Digital page. According to TomsHardware, a Western Digital manager admitted to German publication Heise Medien that WD Red Pro 20TB was actually equipped with 64GB of flash memory. This means that the 20TB Red Disk, like last year’s WD Gold series of the same capacity, uses OptiNAND technology and integrates iNAND UFS embedded flash drive (EFD), combined with a series of technologies to effectively improve hard disk capacity, performance, and reliability.

The WD Red Pro Series 20TB has a sustained transfer speed of 268 MB/s, a rated workload of 300TB/year, and is priced at $499.99, backed by a five-year limited warranty from Western Digital.

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